Racist Storms and Cyclones Focus on Places with More People of Color, Study Finds

I’ll never understand why the weather hates people for the color of their skin.

Can’t the weather see that we all bleed red?

The Guardian:

Atlantic storms have become deadlier as the planet warms – and are disproportionately killing people of color in the US, a landmark new study has found.

About 20,000 excess deaths – the numbers of observed rather than expected deaths – occurred in the immediate aftermath of 179 named storms and hurricanes which struck the US mainland between 1988 and 2019.

More than two thirds of the total excess death toll – and 17 of the 20 deadliest storms – have occurred during the past 15 years, as ocean-heating fossil-fuel emissions have driven increasingly intense hurricanes.

The highest death counts were in counties with majority Black, brown and Indigenous residents, suggesting historical government neglect plays a role in the loss of life in the aftermath of tropical storms, according to the study published in Science Advances.

Tropical storms and hurricanes wreak billions of dollars of damage every year especially on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Yet this is the first study to quantify the storm-related excess death toll over time nationwide – data which could save lives.

Cyclones don’t hit the whole country. They tend to hit places which have more Black, Indigenous and Latin people who’ve been historically underserved and overburdened through racism, and it’s these socially vulnerable communities who are bearing the brunt of post-cyclone excess deaths,” said Robbie Parks, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s public health school and lead author.

“For the first time we have comparable death counts over time, which from a federal government and climate justice perspective can be used as levers for action and resource allocation for evacuations, rebuilds and resilience,” Parks said.

The biggest lesson of global warming is that white people need to pay more money to brown people.

White people worked with the weather to harm them, and since we can’t extract money from the weather, we’re going to have to take it all from whites.